My Log 751 August 12 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 186; A 50-year anniversary film on Woodstock gives this author, for one, plenty of food for thought, and leaves him hoping some better response can be found than to shrug and say, “Wot the hell?”

Over the weekend I watched a most extraordinary documentary that brought me up against questions I have pondered for at least the last half century. The film is called Woodstock, and has been made to mark the 50^th anniversary of the famed Woodstock festival, held in August of 1969. I remember, in the days following the festival, being taken aside by a friend who had been convinced by his young daughter that a whole new world, animated by a new set of values, had come in being on that vast muddy field in up-state New York. I confess he was working against my entrenched scepticism, and it is to explain this that I am devoting this issue of my Chronicles.

It goes back, I guess, to what I grew up believing.  I was seven years of age in 1935 when the democratic socialist Labour Party government was elected  to power for the first time in New Zealand. I grew up in a kind of transitional family, the youngest of six children of a small village carpenter who managed to scrape his way through the Depression by building farm gates and cow byres for the local cockies (which is what we called dairy farmers). 

My older brothers had to leave school to go work for my dad for no pay, one of the desperate measures needed to see us through those hard times. One of my brothers proved to be such a capable man that at about the time of the change of government, he was persuading my dad to lift his horizons, to tender for larger projects, and he did this so successfully as to start our family on a path towards relative prosperity. As a very small child I remember  my Dad inveighing against the wickedness of the previous Conservative government which tried to solve its problems by hiring the unemployed to dig ditches one day and fill them in the next. My Dad was a working-class man to whom this was totally offensive behaviour, demeaning, as it did, the dignity of labour.

At about his time, however, we moved to a nearby city of 26,000 people --- not a big city, it is true, but at the time the fifth largest in the whole country. My Dad’s first major contract was to build an extension to the city’s hospital --- and thus began the transition of my family from the working class into the class of small business people, whose more conservative ideas gradually began to take over the family values.

None of this much affected me: I was 18 years younger than my eldest brother, and, growing up in the city I was never drawn towards the carpentering trade. Although three of my brothers had to go to the war, which broke out when I was eleven,  I was too young to be conscripted into the service. I entered secondary school  in 1942 and spent the four most formative years of my life there. The war was over when I emerged from high school to take my place in the workforce.

Although most of my schoolboy energies were devoted to playing sports --- cricket, tennis. Rugby, track and field, all undertaken seriously, with any number of peripheral games, such as softball, fives, golf, thrown in from time to time ---  these were also years in which my political opinions were formed. An assiduous reader of the country’s newspapers at our local public library, I soon became aware that not a single favourable article that I ever saw was  written about our Labour government, and I can still recall the surprise I felt when reading copies of the New Statesman and Nation  from Britain to find that coherent arguments in favour of socialism could appear in what seemed to be responsible journals of opinion.

This imbalance of opinion was so startling that  as I grew into manhood, I developed a sort of us-against-them attitude, “us” being the ordinary working people, and “them” representing the establishment, always using their wealth to pull the wool over the eyes of people susceptible to their propaganda, and never hesitating to use the iron fist if forced into it in an extremity.  I vowed then, and I have always respected this vow, that I would never vote for anyone representing this entrenched conservative interest.

Thus, my scepticism about the so-called social revolution that overtook the United States in the 1960s as the nation became ever more deeply enmeshed in the unjust Vietnam war. I never understood the enthusiasm engendered by the Woodstock festival, and I have always believed that the inability of the social revolutionaries to make one tittle of difference in the political balance within the United States, has justified my scepticism. 

Having just seen this new film, I am now prepared to say it presents the best-case I have ever seen for the social value of this so-called  revolution. The festival, as here presented, turns out to have been a gesture of goodwill and hope in the future of mankind, staged by a group of amateurish entrepreneurs who didn’t know much about the task they were undertaking, but who somehow managed to preserve their original intention of hope and goodwill, against almost inhuman odds.  One member of this small group had some family money behind him, and they ran into another group who had in mind virtually the same thing, with the added objective of selling some records; between them, they set out to produce a music festival such as the world had never before seen.

First, they had to choose a place big enough, and open enough to handle a large  crowd that could be as many as   25,000 or even more.  They chose a large open field in a small town in upstate New York, began to import the electricity that such a festival would demand, and thus attracted the attention of the local council, who quickly decided they wanted nothing to do with such a festival and passed a resolution making such a gathering illegal within the boundaries of their municipality.

They had already signed up some bands and had begun to sell tickets so  they did not feel they could cancel at this late stage. Looking around some more they finally came upon a large field of farmland whose owner, in the name of freedom of expression, was willing to have his quiet country life interrupted for a weekend, and agreed basic terms with the organizers. The proposal was for a three-day event at a charge of $6 a day. The ticket sales went so well that they quickly began to realize they would need more toilets than they had ever envisioned, and also that they would need to provide food, water, and other basic needs of a huge youthful crowd, of whose dimensions they had no serious idea.

They began to realize they would need some kind of security system, and they stumbled across a locally-installed cult called The Hog Farm, whose leader, a gap-toothed rube by the look of him, offered to take care of security. Instead of constituting themselves as “a peace force” they called themselves “a  please force” which would never hesitate to ask people to please do this or that. The Hog Farm also offered food, cooked in their own non-commercial kitchens.

Three days before the festival was to begin, the organizers  were surprised to find people already turning up, wandering along the approach roads, with their small tents or shelters, sleeping bags, and offering their tickets as the price of admission. The organizers began to realize if this continued there was no way they would be able to collect money or sell tickets because there were no fences around the property.

Before they knew where they were, they found the approach roads were already clogged with huge lines of traffic in which hopeful participants had arrived, parked their cars and wandered the final mile or so to the site. The organizers had managed, before the opening acts, to erect the necessary high electricity towers, and the stage from which bands would perform. When the show got under way, they were already marvelling at the crowd they had somehow managed to attract. Apparently people had arrived from all over the continent, and, hippie-like, had settled down to enjoy the music, toke up with whatever drug they had brought along or could buy from the drug-shops that opened like magic, and  had begun to express their delight in the freedom of the event.

By the second day, the field was packed with people, cheek by jowl, as far as the eye could see: the estimated numbers so far exceeded expectations as  make it quite clear that something had been called into being whose dimensions they could scarcely grapple with even when it lay before their eyes.

That it was a festival, not only of music, but of freedom --- freedom from clothing, freedom from inhibition, freedom of sex and love --- was clear throughout. And The Hog Farm’s eccentric security patrols worked magic enough to keep everything under control.

At the end of the second day, the organizers pleaded with participants to just lie down on whatever piece of land they could claim, and go to sleep, which they obediently did. On the third day even more people arrived along with the promised rain, in which  the careless crowd stood dripping under cardboard sheets, blankets, anything to cover themselves, and those who were not covered took to the mud like children playing in the back yard.

The organizers had to appeal, urgently, for those who had climbed into the towers for a better vantage point, to come down immediately because the electric charge contained in these rain-soaked wires promised to be a killer, a threat that never eventuated, obviously more by good luck than by good management.

There were doctors on the site willing to minister to those --- and there were many of them --- suffering from drug overdoses, if only they could reach them.  Eventually the organizers managed to hire some helicopters to ease the movement of these essential personnel around the field. When the dimensions of the crowd became obvious, the military authorities began to take an interest. They sent in some  military helicopters, arousing lively fears in the crowd of possible consequences, fears that were stilled when the loudspeakers announced  that ”they are on our side, they are doctors, they have come to help us.”

Various tributes are paid in the film to certain bands and singers ---Joan Baez, for example, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana apparently being among the headliners who delivered more than could have been expected of them.

The final act, one that is unforgettable, came with the little-known Jimmy Hendrix, who, seizing his guitar and playing it in a way that no one had ever heard a guitar played before, performed a terrifying rendition of the US national anthem, whether as promise or threat it would be hard to say.

In the end, they estimated the crowd that attended at 350,000, many of whom stayed on to pick up the garbage and deliver it to pickup trucks for removal from the field.

One of my sons, Thom, a veritable encyclopedia about popular culture, said when discussing with me the meaning of Woodstock, that it was a matter of intent, of its intention to celebrate human freedom in all its forms, an intention they managed not to waver from until the end. In that, it was distinct from the equally renowned, but less admired Altamont concert given four months later by the Rolling Stones. This too attracted an audience of more than 300,000 people, but ill-advisedly the band had  hired the  Hell’s Angels motor-cycle group to handle security. They were, apparently, suggested by the band The Grateful Dead, who were, themselves,  during the concert, so intimidated by the atmosphere that developed under the leadership of the Hell’s Angels, that they left the site without playing. During the chaos that developed around the stage one young person was killed, an event that has become infamous in the history of rock and roll.

This melancholy event brought to an end the previous pretension that a new dawn had arrived for America during the “social revolution” of the 1960s. That was so far from being the case that three years later Richard Nixon was re-elected to the presidency with one of the largest landslides in history, in spite of the fact that all the details of the Watergate break-in had already been revealed, and he was held publicly accountable.

Having watched this new account of Woodstock, seen through the eyes of 50 years on, I feel confirmed in my scepticism about the real, political meaning of these so-called “social revolutions”, as they occur in the United States, always accompanied by a great hoo-ha, that blows itself out before long.

The revolution of the 1960s, whatever else it may have done, did not shake by one inch the control of the wealth-owners over  American business, society or, yes over  culture, as has since been proven by the continuing unshakable nature of this control, still being exercised to its maximum by the owners of wealth, who today are indisputably wealthier, stronger and more ruthless than ever before, and who have turned over management of the country to the most  irresponsible narcissistic president in the nation’s history.

All that anybody has found to do about this so far is to shrug eloquently, and say, “wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours gai, toujours gai.”

My Log 750 August 8 2019; Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 185; The Earth’s experts on global warming combine to state the obvious: the use of land has to be sustainable if we are to have any future; and it is no comfort to add that even in Canada it just ain’t being done….

One thing about growing to an advanced age is that one becomes clued in on how repetitive is human experience.

I have been reminded of this --- again! --- by an announcement this week of a finding by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that has been doggedly pursuing a work of documenting the threats to human survival in a planned series of reports, of which this is the second, I believe.

This one deals with the degradation of land, and what can be done about it. It certainly took me back about four or five decades to a time when I was an eager-eyed young reporter — not that young any more, already into my mid-forties ---  uncovering uncomfortable facts about the way we were managing our land, our resources and our economy, among other things.

It was a more or less accepted fact that our intensive, chemically-aided method of agriculture was having the effect of drastically reducing the productive possibilities of our land. But when I looked into what was being done to stop that by our elected government, I discovered that not only was nothing being done to stop it, but we had a huge government department --- the agriculture department --- dedicated entirely, and without question, to a system of land management that everyone conceded was worsening the situation.

Huge areas of Canadian agricultural land were covered in mono-cultured crops --- wheat, oats, barley across the prairies, maize (corn), soy beans, and various other crops  in more moderate climate areas such as Ontario.

 When I asked the department what care was being taken to stop soil erosion, which seemed to be an inevitable consequence of our present system, I discovered the federal government employed just one man tasked with that job. Just one.

That a prestigious international panel of scientific experts should now, decades later, have announced their findings that sustainable land use has to be one bow in the armoury of the fighters to reduce global warming (caused by human actions), might be described as a welcome acknowledgement of what has been known for decades but could also be described as shutting the stable door after the horses have escaped. In face of research such as this describing already well-known facts, my wife used to say, “My grandmother could have told them that.”

Anyway, I don’t want to pretend that I know, or ever knew, the answers to these major questions facing human kind if we are to survive. Only that I remember meeting many visionaries who did have answers to them, who were resolutely ignored.

For example, on the question of saving productive agricultural land , of which Canada has a strictly limited supply, most of it in the southern reaches surrounding our major cities, I remember one professor by name of Norman Pearson, at one of the southern Ontario universities, who made this his virtual hobby horse.  As anyone can see who looks at the land around our cities,  productive agricultural land is sill being gobbled up for urban development as we speak.

I worked on an NFB film, whose title, Niagara for Sale? Posed the dilemma in stark terms. I recall a Minister of Agriculture at the time, Eugene Whelan was his name, telling our camera that if he had money to invest he would be better to put it into Canada savings bonds than into trying to grow food for Canada’s city-dwellers. One man who produced locally-grown tomatoes complained to us that he could not match the prices for which competing tomatoes imported from the United States were being offered. The shrug of indifference with which the Minister addressed that dilemma told us all we needed to know about our government’s attitude towards land management as related to food production. Leave it to California seemed to be the idea.

Similarly around the same time I came across a well-heeled maverick businessman stationed in one of the small towns north-east of Toronto, who had produced a scheme for handling the problem of urban growth by setting out to direct growing urban populations into smaller towns across Ontario’s middle north region, the towns to be linked as in a chain, and with easy access to markets in Toronto, already a burgeoning monster bulging at the seams.  This man’s sensible idea --- the sort of thing that had been successfully tried out by the British Labour government after the war with its satellite New Towns around London ---- was never even given the time of day by any authorities in Canada. The only time I heard anything more about this visionary was during the Oka crisis when a news report said he had used his own helicopter to fly food supplies in behind the lines to the indigenous protesters who were at gun-point with the troops of the Canadian state for many weeks.

It is possible, of course, that  the vary facts of Canada’s existence, cheek by jowl as we are against the world’s most successful capitalist state, simply have not left us the room in which to experiment in any meaningful way with social engineering. If true, that is a devastating indictment of our political class, for Canada is a nation built on a vast territory, with a growing and constantly better-educated work force, with the infrastructure to put in place whatever solutions we might decide upon in face of our major problems.

Though our agriculture department, devoted with almost fanatical zeal to our system of chemical food production, may be beyond being shaken free of its shibboleths, surely the same could not be said of our urban populations, for whom all global knowledge sits right at our doorsteps. Yet here again, the results have not be particularly spectacular. I remember the enthusiasm with which the first Trudeau government of the late 1960s and early 1970s approached these intractable problems. An urban affairs department was established, major investigations into the state of Canada’s cities were undertaken, but unfortunately this new department, standing somewhere between the already-established federal departments, and the different responsibilities of provinces, turned out not to have the muscle needed if it were to elbow itself into a position of strength. So, all the studies done were simply shelved, and the department cancelled as a brave, but ultimately failed experiment.

In addition to that, however, a series of innovative initiatives were put in place to improve the means by which citizens might play their part in social and economic change. The Company of Young Canadians, for example, enabled federally-supported activists to be established among vulnerable populations throughout the country, with the aim of helping them evolve meaningful responses to problems that otherwise might have seemed beyond their powers. The Local Initiative Programme invited people who thought they had a good idea for some improving local initiative to put their ideas into practice. And there were several other similar  initiatives whose names escape me for the moment, which, considered together,  argued that our government was aware of what might be needed if we were to improve our response to major difficulties that lay ahead of us.

I remember several years later asking the  man who had been minister responsible for most of these initiatives, Gerard Pelletier, by the time I met him Ambassador in Paris, what had happened to all these good ideas.  He said the explanation was simple: it was perfectly okay for the Company of Young Canadians to organize to help impoverished tribesmen in Indian reserves in remote locations, in other words, people without any political influence, but when the same effort was directed to the poor crowding in the east end of most of our major cities, the civic authorities immediately heard of it, and went immediately to Ottawa with the following request: ‘What the hell do you think you are doing financing opposition to us among the poor?”  It took only one such response for the initiative to be cancelled.

Ah, well, just some meaningless musing about opportunities tried out and abandoned. To which I am afraid I have to reintroduce my mantra,

“Wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours gai, toujours gai?”

The report’s full name is Climate Change and Land, an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.

My Log 749 August 2 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 184; An agonized Rugby giant brings me a flash of déjà vu; adventures since the age of 16 with a dislocated shoulder

Last weekend for the first time in my life, I had a blinding flash of déjà vu. Surprisingly, it did not harken back to something that I  recalled from earlier in the year or even the last two years. Not at all: this one took me back to when I was 16, which was 75 years ago. And yet, I remember the circumstances as clearly as if it happened yesterday.  Before I explain, I have to warn you that this has to do with a game of Rugby. For those many among you to whom any reference to sport is infra dig, I beg your forbearance. Before you give this up as something entirely unworthy of your interest, and therefore  a lost cause, let me explain:

It is generally accepted within the world of international Rugby that Brodie Retallick, of the New Zealand All Blacks, is the world’s outstanding lock forward. He is a vast hulk of a man, stands 6 ft 8 ins in his stockings, weighs 267 pounds, and on a recent weekend in a test match ran in an amazing try with the ball, pursued over 50 yards by some of the world’s fastest backs, who were unable to make any ground on him. He is a great player by any known measurement.

The reason I mention him is that in a succeeding game, last weekend, he was the victim of a rather unsportsmanlike onslaught by a South African forward of similar dimensions at a moment when he was nowhere near the ball, and he took a heavy tumble and lay there, this impregnable giant of a man, his face bearing the evidence of intense pain, as he held his left arm with his right hand, in an effort to prevent any moment in the arm.  It was an expression I knew only too well, as I  also knew the intense agony he was experiencing, for when I was 16 I was playing a Rugby game between classes in my high school when I was downed by a thundering tackle from a somewhat older boy, who not only cast me brutally to the ground but also demolished any pretension I might have had to being a Rugby player.

Retallick, widely regarded as one of the toughest sons-of-a-bitch ever to play the game, lay there for several minutes, looking like a young school kid himself as his face was consumed in agony, and I had a flashback to that same experience suffered at the hands of a boy stronger, chunkier, more powerful than me by several aeons of measurement, who had simply ploughed right through me as I stood in his path and didn’t have the sense to make myself scarce and let him through.

In those days I tended towards the lanky, loose-limbed variety of adolescent,  so well co-ordinated that I could play almost all games well. I tended to be not-so-good in the games requiring heavy physical contact, of which Rugby is a prime example. Good enough to get into the school’s First XV maybe, but not good enough to excel in any way.

At the time I was more heavily into running races, and I eventually found that even the heavy arm action needed to finish a half-mile race tended to put a strain on the weakened shoulder, a couple of  times leaving me with another fairly mild and easily corrected dislocation. Since this seemed likely to seriously impact on my running I bowed to a medical opinion that the best solution would be to undergo an operation by which --- I am relying on my memory here,  that could be somewhat faulty --- my muscle was in some way threaded through the bone to stabilize the joint in place.

It worked for the following two or three years before I had to give up running because I had a job in a local newspaper with, as one of my first responsibilities, the need to collect information from the weekend sports events around the town.

For many years thereafter I was able to play tennis, but always had to be careful not to lift my serving arm too high out of its normal resting place for fear of another dislocation. After my arrival in Canada in 1954 I was always amazed when I read about or observed on TV that some hockey player had suffered a dislocation that kept him out of maybe one game or two. Occasionally I even heard of players who had dislocated their shoulders, retired briefly to the dressing room, and within minutes had re-emerged to finish the game. Knowing the intense pain involved in a dislocation, this was proof to me either that the hockey authorities were brutes demanding unwise decisions from their players,  or that the players were of a preternatural toughness unheard of in other sports.

Eventually, we became parents to three small boys, with whom every summer we took off from London, England, where they were all born,   on camping trips in France. Anyone who has travelled with three boys between the ages of 6 and 4 will know the sort of tensions that can arise in a car at such times. The kids in the back can repeatedly erupt into furious arguments, about nothing at all. I remember on one occasion the quarrelling went on for hours in spite of my repeated assertions that if they didn’t shut up, I was going to crack one of them. Such threats, of course, had no effect, since they were seldom followed by action. On one memorable occasion, however, as I was driving through the French countryside, my patience snapped and  I turned around, threw my right arm back over my seat with the intention of performing the threatened attack, and, suddenly emitted an arduous cry of pain as my goddamned shoulder slipped out of place  again, for the first time in many years. I hurriedly pulled my arm back over the seat and in doing so, miraculously, it seemed, I pulled the dislocated bone back into its rightful socket.  It was the first time I had had this problem since my operation 20 years before.

Fast forward to two other regrettable, but unforgettable incidents.  I was recalled from London after eight years there in 1968. I had saved enough money to buy a beautiful home on Kelvin avenue, a quiet street in Outremont. Newly installed, our renovations completed, we invited our many friends for a monster house-warming party. In the afternoon, I was vacuuming the stairs when I slipped, slid down towards the bottom, clutching the vacuum-cleaner all the way, and dislocated my shoulder.  I was taken to the Jewish General, where they managed to manipulate the bone back into its socket, gave me some morphine to reduce the pain, and allowed some of the friends who had arrived at the party by this time and were already refreshing themselves at the bar, to visit the patient.   They came storming into the ward, holding their wine glasses high, pouring some for me, and disrupting the calm serenity of evening in the ward. Eventually, faced with this disturbance, and being apprised of the circumstances, the doctors decided they might as well discharge me since there seemed no reason I needed to stay overnight.

A second similar incident happened a few months later: again, I was cleaning the house, and this time an ambulance arrived and took me to St. Mary’s hospital. There, they tied a heavy weight on to my arm, and lay me face down on a bed, with my arm hanging towards the floor, and suffering from excruciating pain. I kept shouting for someone to come and rescue me from this hospital-imposed terror, and eventually, after some hours of this, I was released and a doctor was found willing to try to restore the joint to normality by orthodox methods.

I have never had a high opinion of St Mary’s Hospital since that agonizing experience, and today I use the Jewish General as my hospital of last resource.  I was recently diagnosed with lung cancer.  Working through my family clinic, I was promised a visit with a specialist at a date that would have meant four months had elapsed between diagnosis and treatment by a specialist. I decided to cut it short, turned up at the Jewish General emergency room at 7 am one Tuesday, had given blood by 7.30, had an x-ray by 9.00, a scan by midday, and was being examined by a specialist by 3 pm.

I have been a patient at that hospital ever since, and am in admiration of it, for its widely-praised employment policies, its extraordinary range of specialists available on almost every medical subject under the sun, and its regular, efficient operation. 

I may be coming towards the end of my time. But I am comforted by being in the care of the Jewish General, and its United Nations staff, drawn from around the world.